----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- I quickly acknowledge my agreement with Susan Feiner's claims that most economics education is chalk and talk by white, male middle-aged profs, and that there are few Marxists in the B-Schools. My point is that in many of the other classes in the social sciences and (especially) the humanities, and in much of the media, economic topics are presented in such a way that the standard economics message is quite different. If students have an opinion at all about foreign trade, for example, it will be that it causes loss of domestic jobs, that it leads to exploitation of foreign workers by greedy U.S. multinationals, that it hurts the rainforests, and so on. Unless they are regular readers of _The Economist_ (and none are) they have never heard the term "comparative advantage" and they think terms like "property rights" and "profit" are really dirty words. After my class I suspect that a sizeable portion remains unconvinced (and of course another portion have no idea what we have been talking about all semester). But my impression is that few have ever heard the economic arguments (as opposed to more self- interested ones - e.g., "Greed is good") in favor of certain institutional set ups. In that respect, the standard economics education actually contributes to pluralism. This is not to say that a good debate by informed parties wouldn't be even better. So perhaps this is an argument for more co-taught courses by civil people who disagree. Bruce Caldwell ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]